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Times do change. Yesterday, PHIL DONAHUE was a guest on someone else's talk show -- QUEEN LATIFAH'S -- alongside the most frequent guest on ''Donahue,'' RALPH NADER. This week Mr. Donahue has been doing something he did not do when he was on the air: campaign for a political candidate -- namely, Mr. Nader, the Green Party's presidential nominee -- and the Queen Latifah taping had Mr. Donahue sounding as energized as he did in the old days, when he would run up the aisles into the studio audience with a microphone in his hand.

''Everybody in that audience was 19 years old,'' Mr. Donahue said after the taping of the program, which will be broadcast on Monday. ''We had a big daytime talk show welcome, lots of screaming, welcoming Ralph, treating him like a rock star.'' A moment later, Mr. Donahue said, ''I never had the screamers. I wish I had. Maybe I'd still be there.''

Asked when he met Mr. Nader, he mentioned 1965, when he was the 29-year-old host of a radio call-in program in Dayton, Ohio, and Mr. Nader was the author of ''Unsafe at Any Speed,'' about the Chevrolet Corvair and General Motors.

''I used to get Nader out of hearings to do my show,'' with Mr. Nader on a long-distance telephone. ''I was impressed with him then and I have retained my admiration for this guy,'' Mr. Donahue said, adding that in more than 6,000 episodes of ''Donahue,'' Mr. Nader appeared 33 times, more than anyone else.

So what about polls earlier in the week that suggested Mr. Nader was fading?

''I think I would change the verb,'' Mr. Donahue said. ''I think the fade is no longer there. We're on the upswing there.''

That led Mr. Donahue to two of his favorite subjects of the moment, the presidential debates and the power of the major political parties. ''They want a cast of two, their two,'' he said. ''They've thrown a ring around the tent and the stage and they're not letting anybody else in. Whatever the framers intended, this was not it.''

And then there was Family Circle magazine, which said that LAURA BUSH'S recipe for ''Texas governor's mansion cowboy cookies'' had defeated TIPPER GORE'S ginger snaps in a poll of its readers.

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The magazine said that 1,078 readers sent in ballots after the magazine printed the recipes in July and that 77.4 percent favored Mrs. Bush's cookies, which are made with sweet coconut as well as chocolate chips.

Predicting the outcome of a presidential election based on cookie recipes may sound like forecasting the stock market based on fashion trends, but not to the editor in chief of Family Circle, SUSAN UNGARO. ''I suspect that not every woman voted with her taste buds,'' she said.

At the American Craft Museum's dinner-dance on Wednesday at the Pierre, the actress LORRAINE BRACCO presented an award to MARTHA STEWART. Before that, when the crowd was milling around in the Cotillion Room, someone commented that Ms. Stewart was an appropriate choice since ''Martha Stewart invented crafts.''

That may have been like saying that VICE PRESIDENT AL GORE invented the Internet, and Ms. Stewart, who was standing nearby, set the record straight.

''Not really,'' she said to the claim of invention, adding, ''I do think we made crafting sexier.''

Later DONALD TOBER -- an artificial-sweetener entrepreneur whose wife, BARBARA, is the chairwoman of the museum -- tracked down another guest whose voice he knows only too well. ''I'm so tired of you,'' he told the actor JIM DALE. ''For 70 weeks Barbara has been listening to you on those tapes.'' (Mr. Dale is the voice, or rather all 125 voices, on the Harry Potter cassettes.)